Current Research Programs

South Africa’s national antiretroviral therapy (ART) treatment program, the largest in the world with roughly 2.4 million people on treatment, has made substantial impact on reducing morbidity and mortality for HIV-infected people. As the national program matures, it faces significant challenges in expanding access to harder to reach populations while also maintaining quality of care for those for whom HIV has become a manageable chronic disease, including treatment fatigue, resistance

The successful expansion of access to HIV testing in sub-Saharan Africa has led to hundreds of thousands of people learning that they are HIV-positive. Only a small fraction of these individuals, however, are enrolling in HIV/AIDS care and treatment programs at the time of diagnosis or at any time before they become seriously ill. As a result, most patients seek HIV/AIDS treatment long after they were eligible and with severe illness. At the same time, scale-up of services has put pressure on

For many developing countries the decision to offer HIV care and treatment, at what level and through which delivery model was influenced by the associated costs and effectiveness. As South Africa has a high HIV prevalence and a generalised epidemic, there was a need to provide country specific research to guide policy decisions. HE2RO has actively participated in developing and implementing various HIV costing projects. This work has covered a range of cost issues around HIV treatment

South Africa has one of the most severe epidemics of tuberculosis in the world. TB incidence is at nearly 1%, and some 400,000 cases are reported per year. Estimated TB prevalence doubled between 1990 and 2010, largely as a result of the HIV epidemic. At the same time South Africa bears a disproportionate share of the world’s epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB), with more than 15,000 cases of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) alone reported in 2012. TB in all its forms is the

Many of HE2RO's projects generate high-quality evidence on the impact and cost of health interventions in the areas of HIV, TB and sexual and reproductive health. Because we focus on new interventions and models of care, often this data is the only available, or the only at such level of detail. Whenever we can, we maximize the usefulness of our study results by translating them into national-level projections of the cost and impact of rolling out these interventions further. Working

In 1994, at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, a 20 year program of action for universal access to reproductive health care was adopted by 179 countries. In 2000, the international community recommitted itself to the goals of the ICPD by adopting eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the United Nations Millennium Summit. One MDG, number five, which calls for improvements in maternal mortality, was expanded in 2007 to explicitly include 5b,

The South African Constitution guarantees each citizen’s right to basic health care services. In an effort to better realize this right, the National Department of Health (NDoH) has recently embarked on efforts to reengineer the primary health care (PHC) system in the country. In addition to rolling out the National Health Insurance program to strengthen financial protection, NDoH is expanding access to three streams of PHC services: i) district-based clinical specialist services, focused

The past two decades have brought a number of serious threats to public health in South Africa. One of these is the growing burden of non-communicable, chronic diseases. These diseases are already responsible for a large share of premature adult mortality and morbidity, and the burden they impose on the public sector health care system and national health budget is likely to grow substantially in coming years. HE2RO and its partner, Boston University, are developing a body of work to quantify

Alongside its own research, HE2RO is committed to building capacity to conduct applied public health research in South Africa and neighboring countries. The main disciplines that inform HE2RO’s own work are also the fields in which we provide training: health economics, epidemiology, and program evaluation. Our capacity building activities include formal training through short courses and degree program courses and on-the-job mentoring through fellowships and post-doctoral